Restoration, Nourishment, Integration, Witness

It’s Juneteenth, a quintessential American kind of holiday. Obviously a contraction of June 19^th, it commemorates the date in 1865 when emancipation of enslaved African Americans was announced and enforced in Texas. The history of emancipation is complex (check out Juneteenth in Wikipedia). But that’s not the only Americanism—the actual date of the holiday is June 19 but the federal holiday is celebrated on the following Monday (tomorrow as it happens this year). The original celebrations centered around shared food, the quintessential form of fellowship, but the holiday has become a time to celebrate the richness of African-American culture in all ways.

It also is Father’s Day when we celebrate the bond of fatherhood. It was special for me while my Dad was still with us, all the more so because he wasn’t my father but my step-father—the bond we shared was created from love and experience (and much adolescent angst on my part) over decades. I have Dad to thank for, among other things, teaching me that saying “I love you” builds up the love shared in its very expression. After he and my mother were divorced he had another marriage that lasted for decades, and I had the constant example of the two of them saying “I love you” to each other all through the day every day. Whenever we talked Dad would end the conversation by saying “you know I love you Son.” When my husband and I were married, the priest who presided (curiously, not as an ecclesiastical but as a civil officer of the City of Toronto) blessed us and then said “remember to say ‘I love you’ to each other every day.” My brain, newly ontologically shifted by the marriage, vectored immediately to Dad. And that’s just one tiny example of the power of the fatherly bond.

Maybe it’s no wonder then that people confuse their images of God with those of a paternal parent, it is an easy connection to make. But, of course, God is so much more. In 1 Kings 19 Elijah is hovered over by a very maternal God, by a God who shadows him as he journey’s in the wilderness and who three times wakes him up to make him eat something, one time baking for him a “cake baked on hot stones” to go along with “a jar of water.” Holy food, spiritual nourishment, food provided from love like all those Father’s Day breakfasts and brunches and very much like all those Juneteenth feasts. The love baked into that food is so powerful it keeps Elijah going for forty days, until God finally tells him to “go out and stand on the mountain before [God],” in other words, go stand where you can encounter shifting dimensions, go get on the dimension of God’s love. Elijah goes, after all, the call of love is all powerful, and withstands hurricane-force wind, an earthquake and a fire. But God is recognized, not in those demanding disasters but in the utter “sound of sheer silence.” God is in the gentleness, the new dimension.

In Luke 8 Jesus heals a man possessed by demons. Jesus names the demons, which robs them of their power. In the aftermath we find the man utterly transformed by love into a fully integrated member of the community—the ultimate meaning of healing. Healing means to be restored, to be fully integrated, to be welcomed, to be nourished. The transformed man wants to follow Jesus but Jesus sends him home with the command to be restored, to give thanks, and to tell people of the power of love.

We still are wending our way through LGBTQ pride month. Like Juneteenth and Father’s Day LGBTQ Pride is about fellowship, about shifting into the dimension of love through sharing and feasting and celebrating what God has done in our lives. LGBTQ Pride is about healing in the ultimate sense of restoration and integration and nourishment. And nourishment is just love expressed, love built up by giving, love towering through sharing.

And yet while we celebrate our pride we also have to think hard about the restorative and nourishment parts of it. We have to focus on listening to God calling to us in the sound of sheer silence, we have to remember that all of us created in God’s own loving LGBTQ image are called to build up love by loving. We have to raise our awareness that loving is our sure defense in times of stress, in times when it seems demons are everywhere.

More than ever before LGBTQ Pride must be more than celebration, more than feasting. It must be witness to the love that God has called us to live, to the love that God has called us to give, to the eternal possibility of the dimension of love.

Proper 7 Year C 2022 RCL (1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a; Psalm 42 Quemadmodum and 43 Judica me, Deus; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39)

©2022 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Glorious Grace Bestowed

It has been very cold in Oregon. The other day I found myself thinking I was getting tired of being cold. “If I wanted to be this cold I could have stayed in Wisconsin!” I thought over and over. Mercifully, the Christmastide snow was light and beautiful and gone by the time morning coffee had been consumed each day, and now it is warmer again. Soon we shall be back to full-time rain, which is what winter in the Pacific Northwest is supposed to be like. I’m grateful for all of it, but especially for the sheer normality of it. It seems to me there is grace in the balance and harmony of creation. I feel comforted by it, I feel nourished by it. It is a reminder that all of creation is the issue of God’s love, in harmony, in concentric spheres as nature and humankind and cosmic forces all overlap, building in love, bringing grace and harmony and nourishment.

Out in the “real” world, another COVID surge advances by the moment, and wildfire in Colorado and tornados in Kentucky remind us the climate is changing again, by the moment. The new year ushers in hope, as always. We eat our black-eyed peas and collard greens and cornbread, we share our love, we embrace the love we share in the surprisingly intimate moments of appreciating the gifts given and received in the name of the Christ child. I am made warm by my husband’s comfort in the new shirts I gave him, and his in the pride in the new kitchen tools he gave me, not to mention a new duvet cover—all gifts that comfort and nourish and build up love in concentric spheres.

In the LGBTQ world, trans-Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider continues to win, breaking all-time records including now the highest-winning woman in show history. As celebrated as she has become in the daily game-show news, it’s also no surprise that there is starting to be some trans-phobia in the coverage. We all know what it’s like when LGBTQ people reach for the winner’s circle. Still, there is much grace in the notion that this time the witness is to millions of viewers across the US from all walks of life. I had a bishop once who kept reminding the LGBTQ parishioners that the greatest thing we did was to show up in church and be visible, a witness to the love we share with all who are heirs of God’s love. So each time I see Amy’s brilliant joyful smile and watch the skill with which she wins I am reminded that this is a perfect example of those concentric spheres of love I’ve been writing about.

The climactic scripture this week is the story from Matthew’s Gospel (2:13-15, 19-23) of Joseph and Mary’s flight in the middle of the night with the infant Jesus, and their eventual return to the district of Galilee. What strikes me on this reading is how the action is propelled repeatedly by the voice of an angel appearing to Joseph in dreams. It happens three times! It is a revelation of the force of love’s voice working through the human experience to see that the concentric spheres of love not only are preserved but are built up continuously.

It is in this eternal triumph of love that humanity serves best as interlocking keystone of the glorious grace bestowed, it is here that life becomes like a watered garden. It is in this that the eyes of our hearts are enlightened, by love.

2 Christmas All Years RCL 2022 (Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84:1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23)

©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Do Not Fear Love

It was chilly last night … I had to get up and turn up the heat for the first time in months. Just one of those wonders of the Pacific Northwest. Now at midday the sun is shining brightly and we’re on our way to another late summer afternoon with temperatures around 80° F (27° C); indeed, the coming week will see us back in mid-90° F (32° C) territory. Life here is beautiful always. This is one of the reasons I feel so blessed to have been called to return to Oregon after a many-decades absence. It is really a blessing to be again in the grace of the Douglas Firs and the mountains and rivers and big blue sky and amazingly starry nights. I was able to watch the Pleiades meteor shower just by wandering out in the back yard at night and looking up. Whoosh they were streaking across the sky just for me, like my own movie direct from creation central. It is love that creates this beauty. God’s love, which is the love we all share not only with each other but with the universe provides the theater in which our lives create the play. The very essence of God is love, and even the name of God is love. We are put here as the products of love in order that we might embrace the love that nourishes us and brings forth more love as brilliantly as the Oregon sunshine.

The scripture today is all about perceiving love in the magic of our own realities, about recognizing love when we perceive it, and about giving love in return, which is the life to which God has called us all. In Exodus (3:1-15) we have the amazing story of Moses and the burning bush. We are told that an angel appears in “flame of fire out of a bush … the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.” It is a powerful image of course, but even more powerful is the realization that the angel Moses perceived is really God in all the pure power of love blazing as in our hearts, and yet in the blaze nourishing and protecting and not consuming. Nourishing protection that does not consume is pretty much the very definition of love, isn’t it? Moses and God exchange a little word play about the name of God. God famously says “I AM Who I AM.” What does it mean to say “I am”? It means to define your own very essence. God is love, therefore because the essence of God is love, the name of God also is love.

Angels (both in scripture and in real life) are the manifestation of God’s presence; they appear suddenly and unexpectedly but often in mundane circumstances to let us know that God is with us. In the recognition that we are in the presence of an angel we shift dimensions so as to see that we are actually aware of the eternal presence of God. The presence of God is made known to us in love that nourishes and does not consume, which is timeless and which is ours to return.  The dimension of love is a wonderful place in space-time where nourishment and nurture are the only continuum. All God asks of us is that we give thanks and give love.

In Romans (12:9-21) Paul reminds us of our responsibilities as children born of love. He says “let love be genuine” and reminds us that this means “hold fast to what is good … love one another with mutual affection … outdo one another in showing honor … rejoice in hope … persevere in prayer.” Remember always that love goes out from you; whatever you feel is the love you give so let your love be as genuine as honor, affection and perseverant hope. And in all things seek to overcome the absence of love by filling the space with love.

In Matthew’s Gospel (16:21-27) we have the famous interchange between Jesus and Peter in which Jesus says “get behind me Satan.” The beloved disciple Petros, Jesus’ rock, now called a stumbling block for embracing the opposite of love in his denial of the truth told by Jesus, who is the human manifestation of God (Emmanuel “God with us”), who is love. The figure of “Satan” in scripture is a manifestation of the opposite of love, the obstruction of love. It is the chasm that can arise within when we step back from our responsibilities as children of love, when we fail to recognize the angels in our midst who are pointing us to the presence of God who is love. Of course such a chasm is a stumbling block. The chasm is bridged and then redeemed by filling the space with love. Jesus famously reminds the disciples that to embrace love is to give up the life of self for a better life full of love.

The message is that we must not fear love. We especially as LGBT people, whose very identity is love given by God, in whose image we are created, we especially are made of love, we are made to love, we are called to love. Do not fear love, love will reveal the presence of angels, which will help you move into the dimension of nourishment and nurture—the dimension of love.

 

Proper 17 Year A 2020 RCL (Exodus 3: 1-15; Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c Confitemini Domino; Romans 12: 9-21; Matthew 16: 21-28)

©2020 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Nourishment as blessing*

We’ve been spending the weekend in a gay resort. It’s a place we found some years ago that has a nice mix of casual laid back comfort to it but also a very kind of quiet romanticism. I think I like this sort of thing for several different reasons. At the base I enjoy being away from responsibility—I might spend most of each day writing, but I can intersperse that activity with dips in the pool, walks around the grounds to look at the flowers, or even just sitting on the stoop doing nothing for awhile. But I also enjoy being in a place where it feels like I belong. There are a few single people here once in awhile, but mostly the guests are other long-term couples like us. And even though we come from different places and have different professional lives, still we share some of the basics of being gay couples making our way in the world in long-term relationships. Being together like this allows us to relax in a way that we usually can’t in the general public, where we always have to be looking over our shoulders for the next shoe to drop, as it were. It has been interesting, for instance, of the past few years, to discover ourselves sharing wedding stories, as barriers drop and we find ourselves at last eligible for something we had been raised to think never could be ours.

The urge to belong is an interesting part of human nature. I suppose it is a survival instinct at some essential level; stay with the herd and enjoy safety in numbers (like driving too fast on the Interstate, which apparently is ok as long as one is in the middle of the pack). It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. But there is distinctly a sense of ease about feeling that one is part of something. We are in our sixties, and I know younger gay men who feel the same way about belonging, but for them the desire is strongest to belong to the diversely whole of society. I’m glad that has worked out for them; they’ve grown up feeling as though gay was just another kind of person. I think we grew up in hiding, and then spent our early adulthoods as outcasts, and we’ll probably always have this desire to “nest” among those most like us.

There are two stories in the scripture for today—one is Jacob’s fight with God, all through the night on the shores of the Jabbok, in which he famously gets wounded in the “hip” (a euphemism for you-know-what); the other story is Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand with two loaves and two fish. What I noticed when I read them over in sequence was a parallel between them in which each story begins with the action of withdrawal over or near water, each action gets halted by an immediate necessity, and each story ends with a blessing, which turns out to have been always present but only revealed in the aftermath.

So here I sit at my resort, where we’ve withdrawn to be by the pool. It says to me that the blessing of God is here already in the exigencies we experience not only day to day but also in this social action. In our case the blessing is the sense of relief we derive from being in this calm space among people we might not know well but who we easily see are just like us. It is not unsimilar to the kinds of academic conferences I attend. Usually professors are the only experts in their areas of study in a given faculty, and to find like-minded scholars to talk with requires attending whatever international conference it is. And also it is similar to gay pride festivals—Amsterdam’s is this weekend—which draw huge crowds for a few moments not only of belonging but of belonging in the light. The similarity I suppose is not just in the withdrawal for focus, but more in the way in which it provides nourishment, spiritual in one sense, intellectual in the other. This nourishment is the blessing isn’t it, that sustains us when we go home? The light stays with us to fortify us as life goes on. And life does go on, across the waters and through the exigencies.

The blessing of God is always with us; the nourishment God gives us is our blessing.

*Proper 13 (Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7,16; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21)